February – where’d it go? Hello March, “in like a lion” with your blustery bone-chilling frozen damp and your saucy dumps of snow on bewildered and beleaguered Southern BC. Back on the farm after far too long away, I walk into a wall of terrible teeth and scrabbling claws as the puppies rush to introduce themselves. Their mom, herself an overgrown pup, leaps and crashes and even crabby Jim-dog, who has no idea where these stupid babies came from, greets me effusively.
I had a wonderful time away, of course, but my heart grew a size or two when I stepped off the plane in Terrace and saw my beautiful daughter in her red coat, come to pick me up in our ancient Corolla. “Polly needs wipers,” she said, “and we gotta find a feed store.” Every northern town has a Canadian Tire and somebody somewhere selling supplies to farmers and backyard homesteaders. With the help of Google Maps and the lady at the pet shop (budgie gravel will do for new chicks, and we were expecting upwards of 80 of them in a few days), we found what we needed, resisted the urge to buy 4 cute little glittery collars and matching leashes, and eventually got on the road for the two-hour drive home.
My daughter and I catch up on the drive. We talk chickens. I’ve been reading up in my hammock in Mexico, while watching people’s backyard hens free range with their chicks, who dart about like they’re on wheels, never straying far from Mom. We, on the other hand, are expecting a cardboard box full of fluffballs, hatched in a climate-controlled machine, to arrive at the Smithers airport in a few days. We have been assured that they’ll survive on their absorbed yolk sacs until we can get them settled in the brooder, which is yet to be designed, built, and outfitted. We’ve been warned to expect a few deaths, which we are to consider collateral damage, and reminded they’re “just chickens”.
When the chicks finally arrive, having spent an extra night at YVR and transferred at Prince George, where the ambient temperature is -15C, I wrap the box in my down jacket and hurry it to my overheated truck. It rides, peeping loudly, on the passenger seat and I sing to it until the peeping quiets to a kind of whispering burble. The box seems to like “Angel Band” the best, with its dark yet hopeful lyrics and its description of death as a long, but worthwhile ordeal. Portentous, as it turns out but I am not to know that yet.
Thanks to the young people (and Tim’s willingness to “build, build, build”), and to my nerdy reading of Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens, the brooder box is ready when I get home with the chicks. We’ve set it up in the basement by the wood stove. It’s been cat-proofed, its heat lamp hanging by an adjustable cord, its bedding carefully layered, its cute little mason jar waterers doctored with a bit of vinegar and sugar to get the tiny guts ready for food. The procedure upon opening the box is that as you lift each impossibly soft creature out (weakest ones first), you dip its beak in the water before releasing it. This is how a motherless scrap of a creature, who has only known the inside of an egg and then a cardboard box, learns to drink. There is one clearly expired chick, and the live count is 81 – no, 80, as another one succumbs in my hands and is laid aside in its paper towel shroud.
The past week has sped by in a blur. The chicks still like “Angel Band” the best, and they appreciate the “incoming” warning when its time to change feeders and waterers. What they don’t appreciate is being captured by my hovering, predatory hand, turned upside down and having the poo plug soaked off their miniscule “vent”, which is chicken for exit passage. This is a bit of a dubious skill to brag about down at the pub, and not one I ever thought about needing in my life, but I credit that and a little bag of electrolytes and vitamin powder with keeping the death rate down to seven. So far.
The thing is, the life force is as strong in a two-day old chicken as it is in any of us. It wants to be expressed. It wants to continue, and it wants its host to thrive. The first death occurred in transit, and the second so soon upon arrival that urgency for the rest of them required that I not stop to dwell upon it. Each of the others weakened slowly, in spite of my efforts to hydrate them by, essentially, waterboarding them until they opened their beaks and took in a drop of liquid. I would then turn them upright and the ones who could glurk that water down in the eccentric manner of all chickens, necks stretched, throat working, and return for another drop or two, would revive and survive. The few who could not, died, but not quickly. Typically it took hours. The heartbeat remained strong, the breathing deep, for hours.
It is very hard to tell a dying chick from a sleeping one, and chicks need to sleep a lot. It’s when the whole brood is awake and the heartlessly robust ones are bouncing around yelling and playing that the weaker ones are easy to notice. After awhile, they no longer startle when someone uses them as a stepping stone or pecks curiously at their toes. Even in this state, they take a long time to die, and I wrack my brains trying to devise a hospice bed that is the right temperature and out of the way of trampling feet and curious beaks.
My daughter and I are eager homesteaders who love critters and are willing to half-kill ourselves climbing the learning curve just so we can live surrounded by the dear beasts, but this time we might have outpaced ourselves. The pups are SO CUTE, which I tell my mother every time we talk on the phone. She knows it’s survival talk. They survive because they’re adorable and we survive because we know they will soon be grown and gone to their new homes. Bea, their sweet momma, came away from her momma too young and she’s still needy and a little frantic, so we are determined to deal with poo and pee and bills for the raw meat they fall on like tigers just so we know they will start out right at their new homes. (Okay, so for reals it’s our fault they’re even here, so we’re trying to make up for our ignorance about “first heat” and teenage dog pregnancy by helping turn out some good farm dogs.)
I am eating porridge and drinking coffee as I write this, wanting to finish before it’s time to pile in the pick-up to go fetch the pregnant young sow we’re buying from a more experienced farmer. He can remember what it’s like to get started, though for him that was a long time ago, and he is willing to sell us a proven sow. This means she has had a litter already, so she’s no longer a gilt. In fact, because she’s over a hundred pounds she’s actually a hog, no longer a pig.
Yesterday, while I was on chick duty, the young people built a hog pen out of pallets in the back of the truck, and rigged up the old abandoned barnyard to hold a 400 pound pig in comfort and style. Dogpatch style, that is, with old bedsprings standing in for hog panels, and random plywood filling in gaps in the fence. Ms. Piggy will soon need a specially modified area to give birth but we’ve got a couple of weeks to think about that.